Welcome to The Lost Debata Show for Political Ecclectics.

I'm Ravi Gupta and I wasn't planning to release this episode today, but I had a really good

conversation just now with Michael Shear, who's the White House correspondent for The New York

Times and also the author of Border Wars, which is a book all about immigration.

Shear has been on this podcast before, but we were having a conversation and we were talking

and we knew that we were planning to release this episode right around when the debate came

out. So we're kind of talking about the debate, but trying to frame it in a way that you

listening to it after the debate would make sense. But then we're like, all right, let's just

talk about the debate. And we'll just release it earlier because he was saying really interesting things about the debate. And in particular,

he wrote a piece recently about Biden's inner circle and has done a lot of reporting in and around

the White House about who Biden is getting advice from, et cetera, that I think is really relevant

to what happens on Thursday

night, probably tonight if you're listening to this. So we figured we just let you listen to it now.

And then you get to hear more predictions from us about what happens and then hold us accountable.

So let's dive in.

All right. I'm excited to welcome back Michael Shear, White House correspondent for the New York Times.

Mike, what happens in a debate week? We're talking the day before the debates. Are you up or over near Camp David? Or do you get the week off? Do you work from home? What happens here?

No week off. I'm home right now. There are a bunch of us that are going down to Atlanta for the

debate. I'm thankfully not one of them. I've been to too many debates in my, in my, uh, in my career.

So, well, okay, pause there. What's the most memorable for you?

The most memorable was, is really an embarrassing story. I, I, I can't remember it was

the 2008 cycle or the 12 cycle and I was covering one of the presidential debates or one

...